McCaffery: Injury math doesn’t add up for Brett Brown

The Sixers’ Joel Embiid, right, listens to apparently pleading head coach Brett Brown, left, before reentering against the Oklahoma City Thunder Wednesday night at Wells Fargo Center. Embiid’s playing time is being limited by team officials ... and perhaps not coincidentally, the Sixers lost a close one on Opening Night.
CHRIS SZAGOLA — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHILADELPHIA >> Joel Embiid collected a rebound, then another, then another, then hit a jump shot, then blocked a Russell Westbrook shot, thrusting a capacity Wells Fargo Center crowd into an uproar.

Finally, Sixers fans were seeing what they’d been promised for two years.

Finally, Embiid was showing why some had likened him to Hakeem Olajuwon, and others would mix in the name Tim Duncan.

It was happening, live and loud, with every first-quarter rush down the floor an opportunity to see the Sixers’ future. It was happening at last.

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And with that … Embiid was dragged out of the game.

So it will be, at least until Brett Brown is told otherwise. And Wednesday, before the Sixers’ 103-97 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder in the season opener, the Sixers’ coach was told to limit the third-year pro to 20 minutes. He was also ordered not to play Jahlil Okafor, who was coming off a knee injury that ended his rookie season early, more than 14 minutes. With that, Brown, whose parents were math teachers, started with the calculations.

“If you went into my office, it’s a Rubik’s Cube,” Brown said. “I need an abacus. It’s how you spend your money. And then, how do you intertwine it with Jahlil? How do you try to go win a game? You want to save some for the fourth period.”

There it was, the essence of Brown’s job, the main reason coaches are hired at his level. There it was, tucked into his dilemma. The question: How do you try to win a game? In his first three seasons as the Sixers’ coach, Brown wasn’t necessarily pressured to win. Instead, he was asked to coach, by his count, 14 different point guards, many he’d once characterized as basketball “gypsies,” as the organization worked itself back to relevance. By this season, that project should have been close to complete.

Instead, through mysterious orders from a medical staff, he was made to try to concoct winning NBA basketball the way a coach may try to succeed in the NHL: A short shift at a time.

“I have five sets of four-minute segments with Joel Embiid,” Brown said. “I have three sets of four-minute segments with Jahlil Okafor. And then you have Richaun Holmes. And so you intermittently sprinkle it in and you like to pair guys up with their matchups.

“We’re not there yet. It’s too complicated if you make it. So it’s simplistic. We’re going to end the game with Joel. The times he is sitting, he will be on a bike. We’ll monitor that. We practiced this. It’s probably the single thing we learned from the preseason: How to spend our money.”

The NBA is its own numbers game, even for the coaches of the best teams, even with the best players. Soon enough into a season, the good players know when they are to be on the floor and when they are to march off. They take a prescribed break, and they return. So the Embiid situation is not unique. It is, though, extreme.

“I just let the game come to me,” Embiid said. “Obviously, I want to play more. But I’ve got to trust the process. I trust those guys, the doctors. I want to play more. One thing I learned during the preseason is to let the game come to me.”

While it will never be known how things would have been different Wednesday had the Sixers built on the 10-2 lead they had when Embiid was pulled 3:59 into the game, the reality is that it turned into career loss No. 200 for Brown. And if resting Embiid into a third major-league season simply out of fear of continuing injury is going to result in defeat, Brown at some point will need to revolt.

Embiid was special in his NBA debut, scoring 20 points in 22:25. If he can score at that pace, the Sixers can and will win games. But if he has to be dragged off the floor every four minutes, the Sixers will feel the scoring drain and too often lose.

And how much more losing can Brown do before Bryan Colangelo, who didn’t hire him anyway, has enough? Thus, Brown’s position, the one he tried to camouflage after falling to 0-1 with more talk of development.

“We lost,” Brown said, dragged into a discussion about the loss feeling different than in the past. “But I am seeing something that has a chance to grow.”

The Sixers have that chance, and Embiid is high among the reasons. He has a soft shooting touch, a competitive streak, a bounce. Simply, in his first NBA regular-season game, he was as advertised. Better, maybe. Yet asked beforehand what he would consider a satisfying night, Embiid smiled.

“To finish the game,” he said, “healthy.”

That’s a reasonable goal, and it was achieved. The Sixers lost, though. Until that Rubik’s Cube is twisted some more, that pattern likely will continue.

To contact Jack McCaffery, email him at jmccaffery@21st-centurymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @JackMcCaffery